At Chat 19: "Small Amounts of Money Mean A Lot"

NYC Homeless Advocate is Luncheon Speaker

by Susan Stewart

(November 17, 2005) Little things still have the power to move Mary Brosnahan Sullivan, even after 15 years as executive director of New York City’s Coalition for the Homeless.

Mary Brosnahan Sullivan, executive director of the NYC Coalition for the Homeless, was at Larchmont's Chat 19 speaker series.

Recently Ms. Sullivan met a woman named Sheila, who with her 12-year-old daughter had fled an abusive relationship on Staten Island.

Sheila was participating in the Coalition’s “First Step” job-training program and living with her daughter in a shelter. The daughter had a chance to take swimming lessons, something she urgently wanted to do.

“But her mother couldn’t afford a swimsuit,” said Ms. Sullivan, speaking to around 50 participants of Chat19 Restaurant's Food & Thought luncheon series on November 3. “A cheap suit would cost $10 or $15, and she had tried without success for three weeks to save that amount.”

The Coalition stepped in and provided funds for a swimsuit. The daughter learned to swim; her mother is staying afloat, too, with a job as a receptionist at Estee Lauder.

Said Ms. Sullivan, “It’s easy for me to forget how much small amounts of money mean to desperately poor people.”

Ms. Sullivan usually works with larger amounts; the Coalition has a budget of just under $10 million and a staff of 82. When she started there in 1989, the budget was $1 million and the staff numbered 13.

The Coalition’s growth reflects well on Ms. Sullivan’s tenure, but not necessarily on the state of the nation. “There’s record homelessness throughout the country.”

At present, 34,000 people are sleeping in shelters in New York City, said Ms. Sullivan. The Coalition for the Homeless offers an array of services, from 22 mobile food sites – “we feed 800 a night” – to eviction prevention grants to job training and a summer sleep-away camp for some of New York’s 13,000 homeless children.

“We’re not in the business to provide vast services,” she said. “Our programs serve as a model for what governments should be doing.”

Not everyone in government agrees with Ms. Sullivan, whom the New York Post called a “she-devil” in a recent editorial. Addressing the Chat 19 group, she was temperate in her remarks but didn’t shy away from criticizing politicians.

Currently, she takes issue with Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s census methods. “It’s a big debate, how you count homeless people on the street. The city did head counts at 2 am in February . . . There are literally thousands of people on the street who’re not reflected in these numbers.”

Ms. Sullivan praised former NYC mayor Ed Koch for committing “billions” to affordable housing units, but was less effusive about another former mayor, Rudy Giuliani. “One of the few times I think I saw Rudy Giuliani caught off guard at a press conference was when he was asked why we have 25,000 people in shelters.”

That number has grown since Mr. Giuliani’s term and Ms. Sullivan expects it to increase further. She cited recent assaults on Section 8, the federal government’s longtime housing subsidy program, and new rules that give shelters the right “to throw people out for the most minor infractions of the rules.”

“Also, there’s a new regulation [pending] that says that while you’re trying to prove you need shelter, you don’t get into a shelter. If this comes to pass, there will be children sleeping on the street and families in cars,” she said.

Her husband, John Sullivan, a longtime advocate for the mentally ill homeless, once helped a woman living on a median strip on the Upper West Side.

“She was a nurse who’d had a complete psychotic breakdown,” Ms. Sullivan recounted. “She was in a tent on Broadway.”

Mr. Sullivan found the woman a subsidized apartment. “He asked her, ‘Do you need anything? Dish soap? Towels?’ She said, ‘I need a tent.’ He got her one, and she used it for a few weeks, then gradually got used to the apartment, got on medication . . . People may be crazy, but they’re not stupid.”

“I thought this talk would be really depressing,” said Larchmont resident Barbara Rosenblum. "But it was not. It was hopeful,” she concluded.

The Food & Thought lecture series continues on December 1 with movie producer Leslie Holleran. Ms. Holleran, a Larchmont resident, is currently working on the movie “Casanova,” which stars Heath Ledger and will be released on Christmas Day. She will tell subscribers what drew her to the movie business and about the making of “Casanova.”

For more information about the Food & Thought series, or to attend the next session, email FoodandThought@optonline.net or call (914) 833-9738.

Front Page

Print This Page
Email this page